Defund Culture - new open access book from Gary Hall
Monday, January 19, 2026 at 10:54AM My new book, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal, is now out:
https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
It's of course open access, published by mediastudies.press under the CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use commitment.
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Gary Hall, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal - Why the Arts Are So White, Male and Middle-Class and What We Can Do About It
https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
Calls to expand public investment in the arts often treat the existing cultural and institutional landscape as a given. Defund Culture challenges this assumption, asking instead what kinds of culture are being supported, through which institutions, and to whose benefit.
In pursuing these questions, the book turns attention to the structural inequalities that shape Britain’s creative and intellectual life. Drawing on critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural policy, Hall shows how the dominance of white, male, middle- and upper-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is sustained through longstanding funding arrangements and institutional hierarchies. Expanding access within this system (e.g. through social mobility initiatives)—however well intentioned—will not, on its own, produce structural change.
Rather than offering a programme of reform, Defund Culture explores what it might mean to disinvest from cultural institutions as they currently operate. Taking cues from abolitionist calls to defund the police, Hall proposes redistributing resources away from elite institutions and toward more collective, commons-oriented, and radically relational alternatives grounded in redistribution, institutional transformation, and epistemic pluriversality.
Defund Culture is available online and as a free download in PDF and ePub, on a CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use basis. A paperback version is also available.
https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
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